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    "headline": "Ostriches drink by scooping water into the lower beak and tipping their 9-foot-high heads back",
    "description": "Ostriches drink like most birds: they scoop water into the lower beak, then tip the head back so it runs down a neck that can reach 9 feet high.",
    "datePublished": "2026-11-12T05:53:00+00:00",
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    "keywords": "Franklin Park Zoo, ostrich, Struthio camelus, Washington State University",
    "articleBody": "The tallest bird on Earth has to bring its head down from as high as 2.8 meters (about 9 feet) just to get a drink, and then it does something that looks almost comical: it scoops, lifts and tips its head back to let the water run down its throat. Ostrich drinking clips are trending on Reddit this week, and the method behind them is one most birds share. Scoop, lift, tip, swallow Birds have no lips and no cheeks, so they cannot seal their mouths and suck the way people or horses do. Dr. Marcie Logsdon, a veterinarian at Washington State University who cares for wild birds, explained the standard technique in a university explainer published in June: most birds take water into the lower half of the beak, then raise and tilt the head so the water slides into the throat before they swallow. “If you see birds that tend to come to a bird bath, that’s what you’re going to see,” Logsdon said. “It’s the basic way they drink.” Ostriches are not among the exceptions she lists. Pigeons and doves are the famous outliers: they push the whole beak into the water and use throat muscles to pull it up, a style so distinctive that field guides use it to identify them. An ostrich has a flat, broad bill with a rounded tip, as Boston’s Franklin Park Zoo describes it, which works as a shallow ladle rather than a straw. Why it looks so dramatic on an ostrich The move is the same one a sparrow uses at a birdbath. The difference is scale. According to the species’ Wikipedia entry, males stand 2.1 to 2.75 meters (6 feet 11 inches to 9 feet) tall and weigh 100 to 130 kilograms (220 to 290 pounds). Every sip means lowering a long, nearly bare neck to the ground, filling the bill, and swinging it skyward again, so each mouthful travels down a neck far longer than a person’s arm. That also makes drinking a risky moment. Ostriches watch for cheetahs, hyenas and leopards with eyes nearly two inches across, the largest of any land animal, and a bird with its head at the waterline has briefly given up its best lookout position. How much water does an ostrich need? Less than you might expect for an animal its size, because food does much of the work. Wikipedia summarizes experiments showing that ostriches can go several days without drinking, living on metabolic water and the moisture in plants, and can survive losing up to a quarter of their body weight to dehydration. In one trial, birds given both food and water gained about 8.5 liters of water a day. Converted for American readers, 8.5 liters is roughly 2.2 US gallons, or about 18 standard 16-ounce bottles, taken in one beakful at a time. When water is around, they use it. The same entry notes that ostriches enjoy liquid water and often bathe where they find it, and Franklin Park Zoo points out that ostrich feathers lack the waterproofing oil gland many birds have, so a rainstorm can leave them soaked. Other ways animals solve the drinking problem Badiyaa has looked at how wild donkeys and horses dig desert wells that other animals drink from, at the sociable weavers that build giant shared nests in the Kalahari, and at the physics of how birds land. The ostrich’s version is simple and slow, and it works: one scoop, one head tilt, and gravity finishes the job, repeated until those 8.5 liters are in. Further reading Wikipedia: Common ostrich Washington State University: How do birds drink? Image: Thomas Fuhrmann, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.",
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